Padres & the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes

Posted on January 15, 2025 by admin

Read my preview analysis here

Silence from the Padres on the first day of the 2025 international draft means intense conversations with other GM’s regarding acquiring more bonus money for Roki Sasaki. This may be part of a series of trades AJP is about to make. Increments of $250,000 in international bonus money can now be traded. It’s not the money teams are trading, but the rights to spend that money on signing a player. How it is valued we are about to find out. AJP is a GM pioneer like that.

Consider this, if you were Padres GM AJP and wanted Roki Sasaki more than anything this winter, then you would do whatever it took to impress him, right? Money talks, so AJP is looking for 14 chunks of $250K from teams around the league who have international bonus money to spare. He’s letting all the other top talent get signed so every spender is spent, then AJP can get the international bonus money cheaper.

Timing is surely important to his plan, and that’s why it was so critical to keep East Coast Bias off his back while he executes it. AJP has until January 23 to sign Roki Sasaki before his Japanese posting window closes. Remember, the Blue Jays are the kicker team if MLB blows up AJP’s plan, as he brilliantly neutralized East Coast Bias with Laurentian Bias. It was a masterstroke of baseball GM genius.

By my calculations, the Padres & Blue Jays can acquire up to $3.5M, as no more than 60% from the base amount is allowed. The Dodgers can acquire up to $3M extra. If AJP is running this show, and I have postulated that he has from the start, then the Dodgers & Blue Jays are in no man’s land right now. Unable to act in the international draft in the vain hope of signing the ultimate prize: Roki Sasaki.

Every MLB team had a contingency plan to pivot from Sasaki if their bid failed. Some teams pivoted earlier than others. In many ways, the teams that were never in on Sasaki were the best off, as the weren’t distracted by something they weren’t going to get anyway. A Sasaki level of talent is like a drug that has you in the grips of addiction, you can’t quit as it consumes you. If affects your judgment because it’s so emotional.

Whatever the Dodgers Plan B on Sasaki is, it is slipping away as teams sign the top remaining international talent for 2025. This after they left $2.1M unspent last year on an early Sasaki signing gambit, that was as insulting as it was short-sighted. Andrew Friedman is currently in an impossible situation which he partly put himself in. If he keeps waiting, all the other top talent will have signed elsewhere and the Dodgers risk getting shut out of the 2025 international draft. The same dynamic applies to the Blue Jays, and that’s what happens when you go all in & fall short. If the Dodgers/Blue Jays sign another top talent, it’s a concession they aren’t getting Roki Sasaki. What do you do? Tick, tick, tick…

The only MLB team that didn’t have a Plan B on Roki Sasaki was the Padres. With their current payroll situation, this was simply a matter of failure not being an option for AJP and the Padres. You can follow this action from afar by monitoring which teams are signing the top-50 international prospects, and who still has bonus money to spare. Anticipate some complex 3-way deals trying to line up competing interests for the Padres purpose of AJP acquiring bonus money for Roki Sasaki.

Wed 15 Jan 2025 09:32 PM CST

End of Day 1 summary & analysis

Beyond the SDP, LAD & TOR, other WS contending teams that have been noticeably quiet so far are: NYY, BOS, ATL & PHI. Small market teams have feasted on Day 1 of the MLB international draft. On the big market side, the SFG & NYM each signed a top-5 prospect, but it’s the middle & small market teams that are reaping the early benefit of neutralized East Coast Bias.

Kudos to the Rays, Brewers, Twins, Marlins, Cardinals, etc, who are signing talent and using their pool money early & aggressively to improve their organizations. This is their big chance at low-cost future stars. Every draft class has a few guys who come out of nowhere to become impact players or stars. When the top prize is out of reach, a baseball GM must be realistic and find that talent amongst what remains available. That’s what organizational scouting departments are for.

AJ Preller is the type of GM who has the gonads to say to all of them: “I’m getting Sasaki. Who’s gonna deal me the $3.5M in Monopoly money in their bonus pool so I can pay this kid what he deserves?” It’s better to get it all at once and AJP will eventually find a price he likes in that market.

Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins and team president Mark Shapiro are at the helm in a long-shot situation in Toronto. They certainly know they are the kicker in this AJP deal. When do they act? Or do they just wait & see? Would they dare try to acquire $3.5M in bonus pool money? What would it cost them & what are the chances they will get stuck with it?

How about Andrew Friedman who is in a similar (but different) spot with the Dodgers? That $3.5M in funny money isn’t worth a whole lot, but perhaps it’ll return a better prospect from the Padres system than what was available in the 2025 international draft. Who knows? It will be worth a gamble for some team(s), and it only takes one with the unusable money to make a deal.

Too many teams still have most or all their bonus pool money for this not to be on MLB GM’s minds. Most heavyweights have usually signed a top player or two from this top-50 list by the end of day 1. The pickins’ only get slimmer on day two if you don’t hit the jackpot. From #2-50, only twenty prospects remain unsigned as of this writing. #2-7 are signed, with the Mets paying #3 prospect Elian Peña, SS, D.R. $5M. Other prospects around him got ~3$M. The other top prospects left will go for $1M-$2M. Prospects at the bottom end of the top-50 are going for $800,000+.

Beyond that it is a murky free-for-all, and that’s why it’s so important for an eligible international prospect to be on this top-50 MLB list. Most of the top prospects are from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela & Cuba– in that order. Prospects signed for <$10K don’t count towards the team’s bonus pool, and there are more than a few of those guys every year.

Sometimes the easiest answer to a difficult problem is a direct approach. A Padres three-way trade (as posited earlier) probably involves too many moving parts which can drop out, especially when Black Hand influence is in the midst. It allows for too many media leaks also. AJP needs one team (or two at most) to deliver the money for Roki Sasaki. Then he can sign the coveted ace with the proper financial respect, and all other Padres deals in the works can then be made.

Thu 16 Jan 2025 1:05 PM CST

It is now being reported on MLB dot com that the Padres & Dodgers have been calling other teams about acquiring bonus pool money– which is what I postulated yesterday. The Blue Jays apparently haven’t, which makes sense as I’ve outlined already. As a surprise dark hose, the Blue Jays have to be cautious with all these sharks in the water. The Dodgers are the beast of MLB right now, and clearly Andrew Friedman feels they should be all-in on Roki Sasaki to the end.

It’s a calculated risk based on the premise that Roki Sasaki is infinitely more valuable than any other eligible international draft prospect in 2025. It’s also his competitive nature to not give into the Padres on anything, who at this point are the Dodgers fiercest rival. Giving in is the worst sin.

Hypothetically, if the Padres currently have a 70% chance in these sweepstakes, with the Blue Jays at 20%, and the Dodgers 10%; Friedman would still play this same strategy. Andrew Friedman is (at minimum) trying to drive up the price for AJP to obtain the $3.5M he’s seeking from other teams. The Dodgers can only obtain up to $3M more, as they have a smaller original bonus pool.

Remember, this isn’t money that is being traded, it’s the right to spend that money on signing a player. In other words, the $3.5M (or $3M) these teams are seeking is monetary credit that can be traded and turned into bonus money which that team can pay to a new signee. Other MLB teams are now realizing they can possibly get a prospect in return for their bonus money credit, which both the Padres & Dodgers are seeking. Only one team can use this money to sign Sasaki, so it’s a game of blind-mans’ bluff between the Padres & Dodgers GM’s. If AJP suddenly acquires $3.5M, what does Andrew Friedman do? Or vice versa?

What the value of that bonus pool credit will be is what’s being discussed by these GMs, with other GM’s. The longer the international draft goes, the softer the market becomes for acquiring bonus money. The remaining international prospects aren’t as attractive, so acquiring a Padres or Dodgers prospect for Monopoly money gets teams excited to make a deal. As I wrote earlier, the Padres/Dodgers prospect they could receive may be better than anything left in the international draft, plus it won’t cost that team any real money to acquire that prospect. Nothing gets MLB GM’s more aroused than potentially getting something for nothing.

The Red Sox spent their pool money since my last update, so they are eliminated from this group of teams that have been inactive with possibly this trade strategy in mind. There is more than enough surplus bonus pool money around MLB for both the Padres & Dodgers to acquire their max limit, and even the Blue Jays too ($3.5M) if they were inclined. I don’t believe Andrew Friedman or AJP would give up anything close to a top-30 prospect in a trade market this soft, but it’s still unknown.

What I do know is that if the Black Hand of MLB blocks AJP’s pool money deal, he’s already picked out the Blue Jays prospect he wants for the $3.5M bonus money he has available in his bonus pool. AJP is far ahead of his competitors on this, as Andrew Friedman is stalking AJP’s every GM move.

If you want Roki Sasaki, then you have to go the extra mile and then some. Both Friedman & Preller know what is at stake, while knowing everything about how the system works. The Padres have more money to offer and can add more than the Dodgers. That is a fact. The Blue Jays can’t risk this gamble, which is an appraisal.

Between the Padres & Dodgers, one team is going to bust and go home with nothing in the 2025 international draft. Set-backs like that have rarely happened to the Dodgers under Andrew Friedman, as AJP seeks to level the competitive playing field with his arch-rival by doing whatever it takes to get Roki Sasaki ALL his bonus money.

This process is really about more than the money. It’s about doing your job as a GM to take care of a coveted player’s interests. It’s about proving your organization’s worth to that player to earn his loyalty. The team that does that best will win the Sasaki sweepstakes.

Fri 17 Jan 2025 11:52 AM CST

The Black Hand intervenes–again

It has just been reported by MLB that the Padres are out of the Sasaki sweepstakes and the Blue Jays have made a deal with the Guardians for the bonus pool money needed to sign Sasaki. Padres fans have seen this before, as this eerily recalls their pursuit of Shohei Ohtani in 2018. I suspect Dodgers GM Andrew Friedman convinced MLB to not approve any type of Sasaki-Padres deal– and they agreed out of competitive self interest. Clearly, AJP tried to get the bonus money for Roki Sasaki, but apparently no one would trade it to him– because the Black Hand was looming.

Notice that the Dodgers never got that bonus money the were talking so loudly about acquiring in the media for the past two days. Why not? It’s because they knew they were already out, and were doing anything (by hook or crook) to keep the coveted ace from ending up in a Padres uniform. Dirty tricks are part of the Black Hand’s modus operandi, and Andrew Friedman used his big-market clout to block his arch-rival AJP by that means. I have no respect for that. It’s equivalent to losing at something, then asking your parents to intervene on your behalf because you didn’t like the results.

This happened in 2018 when the Red Sox convinced MLB (in a more open & ham-fisted manner) that the Padres didn’t deserve Shohei Ohtani. How else does anyone explain Roki Sasaki to the Blue Jays? A few weeks ago, Toronto wasn’t even on Sasaki’s list, after he had been planning this jump to MLB for years. Once again, the Black Hand has revealed itself, and once again MLB writers & reporters who know better will bury this story. They could get fired & blacklisted for telling the truth here.

For seven years, no one (but me) has explained how Shohei Ohtani got to the Angels, the same way no one will honestly explain how Roki Sasaki is going to end up with the Blue Jays. AJP has been forced to pivot to the remaining international prospects after his Sasaki master plan was nullified by the wave of MLB’s Black Hand. The Padres organization & their fans wish Roki Sasaki the best in Toronto, but they are not only disappointed, they are disgusted by all this.

No, the best team doesn’t always win. That’s because there’s too many behind-the-scene machinations which rig the game in favor of the big market teams and their interests. It’s sad to realize this truth of life through a kid’s game like baseball, but these sports are big business and money rules.

Fri 17 Jan 2025 12:49 PM CST

Conclusion

The lesson of lessons in major sports, business & politics (which all this is) is: You must ALWAYS account for the Black Hand. Read that last sentence a few more times until it has absorbed into your marrow before reading on. I understand I’ve sounded somewhat like a lunatic-fringe conspiracy theorist at times as the Black Hand has been a leitmotif during my writings on the Sasaki Affair. But now that story has been written (largely by me), and it has unfolded in the context I provided beforehand, giving the reader everything necessary to understand this murky process, I feel it is time for me to take my leave.

Once again, it was NEVER an open contest among 30 MLB peer competitors. It is instead a monopoly capitalist rigged playing field. That is the Black Hand. Exposing that is more important to this writer than who gets Roki Sasaki. I love baseball, but it’s just a tool in life, and that’s the difference between me; and MLB writers such as Jon Morosi, Ken Rosenthal, Jeff Passan, etc, who have been reading & sharing me during the Sasaki Affair. My message to all of them is. “Tell the fans the whole truth– for a change… and fuck Buster Olney.”

In this spirit of sportsmanship, there are no hard feelings towards Roki Sasaki from Padres fans– particularly this one. This Padres fan holds those who are truly accountable to blame. The Black Hand hates exposure above all else, and this is how to strike back.

That’s what made my 2018 Ohtani Affair coverage so valuable, and why MLB has hidden its facts since. I believe my artist name was heatedly discussed at the MLB owners meeting held in Orlando, FL shortly after that murky 2018 international affair. My MLB account (handle: Ric Size) was deactivated and commenting became near impossible for me, until MLB killed all the team message boards later that year.

That’s an event that REALLY affected baseball fans and was never reported in the mass media, due to the Black Hand. If allowed to remain in the murky shadows, the Black Hand becomes the all-powerful nefarious force which violently consumes us all. In Trotskyist Marxist terms based on dialectical materialism, the Black Hand is imperialist capitalism.

Over & Out

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Colin Rea & San Diego Padres history

Posted on January 13, 2025 by admin

Colin Rea just signed a 1yr/$5M contract with the Cubs.

RHP Colin Rea was the other starter in the infamous Andrew Cashner trade deadline deal in 2016. Rea was healthy when the Padres traded him, but Marlins manager Don Mattingly wrecked then-rookie Colin Rea the first day they got him, after which the Marlins front office whined & demanded the Padres take Rea back while returning pitching prospect Luis Castillo, whom the Marlins would later deal to the Reds for junk. In the wake of his heist of Fernando Tatis Jr from the CWS, and Red Sox whining over trades they won (Craig Kimbrel, Drew Pomeranz), MLB forced Padres GM AJ Preller to acquiesce to the Marlins demands. GM Mike Hill was a principal part of this sordid Marlins history and a huge reason why they stink today.

Marlins started Colin Rea the day they acquired him, on his normal 4-days rest after a cross-country flight to Miami. The Marlins were more of a max-effort staff, based on ace RHP Jose Fernandez (RIP). Rea, who had 99.1 IP as a rookie starter for a soft tossing stinky Padres staff, went directly into a playoff chase atmosphere where he was expected by everyone in the organization to go max effort to help his team win. It lasted 3.1 IP, before his elbow snapped, as he signaled to manager Don Mattingly he was hurt and needed to leave the game. Before this on Sunshine Sports Network, Marlins GM Mike Hill was raving about how Colin Rea was such an important throw-in to this trade and expected him to help them win for years. The next day, Mike Hill is demanding the Padres compensate the Marlins for their stupidity & reckless handling of a rookie pitcher clearly near his season’s innings limit.

To Colin Rea’s credit, he didn’t let all these murky MLB machinations in 2016 define his career. The Brewers deserve serious kudos for resurrecting Colin Rea as a respectable pitcher, to the point where a big market team in 2025 will pay him $5M to fill out their rotation. Colin Rea as Brewers starter beat the Padres a few years back, and AJP was quoted afterwards, “Who saw that coming?!” This from the GM who was suspended by MLB for a month over all this, No overview of Colin Rea’s MLB career can ignore this fascinating GM history.

Upon returning to the Padres, Colin Rea had his TJ surgery, but the soft-tosser was eventually released by them in November 2018. Rea pitched in Japan for a few years until the Brewers took him on as a reclamation project in 2021. He didn’t pitch in MLB in 2022, but then had two productive years with the Brewers in 2023-24.

As background, in the 2016 J2 (July 2) international) draft, Padres GM AJP spent $70-80M on young Latin talent. Before that, no MLB team had ever spent over $5M in a signing year. Teams got REALLY upset over that, so MLB changed their international draft rules & money allotments due to AJP. All that 2016 international draft madness happened around the time of the Colin Rea trade fiasco, and this is why some baseball people love AJP, and others don’t. He’s definitely not boring, which used to define the Padres. For a long time during AJP’s early years, there was a solid majority among the MLB owners & media that the Padres should be boring.

AJP has made the Padres competitive & relevant and kept them there, which no other GM has ever done. With all the trades AJP made to dump his veteran roster in 2016, the Padres never lost 100 games in a season during their building process. MLB media would endlessly accuse them of “tanking”, as they patiently rebuilt their entire system from within. “Why aren’t the Padres signing free agent Ian Desmond? They need a shortstop!!” These-type hysterics of irrational baseball thought would echo from every MLB & ESPN writer onto AJP. Beating the Dodgers is a monumental task, especially from inside their division. The reality of the all-powerful Dodgers has driven AJP to every extreme, and he has run headlong into the old guard of MLB repeatedly, which has done everything in their power to slow down the Padres, including tampering in AJP’s pursuit of RHP/DH Shohei Ohtani in 2017-18.

Buster Olney of the Red Sox/ESPN was lead hatchet man on that. If the Padres would have signed Ohtani, MLB would have confiscated their record 2016 international draft haul, so AJP kicked Ohtani to Angels GM Billy Eppler because it did the Padres the least harm. East coast bias markets (Red Sox, Yankees & Mets) were violently upset that Ohtani had spurned them for the west coast, and the Padres as an early favorite to land the two-way star was too much for them to stand. That murky chain of events is why no one in MLB can ever explain why Shohei Ohtani ended up with the stinky Angels in 2018.

AJP was then forced by ownership to pivot to 1B Eric Hosmer, who was handed a record free-agent contract whose main purpose was to buy the Padres ownership into the “respectable” club of MLB owners. This status was solidified when they signed 3B Manny Machado next winter. SS/2B Xander Bogaerts was another ownership splash from which AJP now has to recover. When deep-pocketed Padres owner (Peter Seidler) died of cancer in the same year their cable deal with Diamond Sports Group went bankrupt, Preller was forced to cut payroll under new ownership. First Juan Soto to the Yankees, and now Xander Bogaerts is the next contract AJP needs to move.

The Padres have taken extra care to make sure the ‘Ohtani affair’ doesn’t happen to them again in 2024-25 as they prepare to sign Japanese pitching phenom Roki Sasaki. Padres are in on him, as AJP is definitely one of the top-3 GM’s in MLB– along with Andrew Friedman & David Stearns. After Roki Sasaki makes his decision this week, the Padres will become hyperactive in the trade & talent acquisition market.

The Roki Sasaki countdown:

Mon 13 Jan 2025 06:50 PM CST

It was just reported on ESPN & MLB dot com that Roki Sasaki has narrowed his list to three MLB teams: San Diego Padres & Toronto Blue Jays, who have a $6,261,000 bonus pool this year, and the LA Dodgers at $5,146,200. No one has picked the Blue Jays, and some could view this as a respectful nod to Canada. Blue Jays fans should feel delighted they made the final list, over their rivals in New York & Boston, but they aren’t signing Roki Sasaki.

The Dodgers have been picked as the favorites in the Sasaki sweepstakes from the start, and conventional wisdom favors it. But there was a revealing sign the Dodgers are being played, or at least out-of-the-loop, when it was reported they had left $2.1M in their 2024 international bonus pool to sign Roki Sasaki early in the posting period, if possible. The Baltimore Orioles also played this losing strategy, leaving $1.9M in their pool which expired December 15.

On Wednesday morning, 9:00 AM EST, the new international signing period opens and Roki Sasaki can be signed for maximum bonus pool money, and teams can make trades to increase their signing bonus allotment by up to 60% from their initial figure.

In the last two international signing periods, the Padres have given all their money to sign the top prospect on the first day: C Ethan Salas in 2023, then SS Leodalis De Vries in 2024. AJP will give all his pool money to Roki Sasaki in 2025, save possibly a few hundred thousand dollars to sign a kid (or two) he likes from Latin America.

Mon 13 Jan 2025 08:42 PM CST

Toronto is a brilliant third choice finalist. It neutralizes the Yankees & Red Sox from messing with AJP’s business. If MLB ruins his deal now, he’ll encourage Roki Sasaki to sign with the Blue Jays and see how fans like that in New York & Boston. No one wants the Dodgers to get Roki Sasaki except Dodgers fans, so it creates acceptance from MLB towards the Padres, which AJP couldn’t get back in 2018 when he got jerked by East Coast Bias on Shohei Ohtani. Very well played by AJP.

One ironic note, the tip-off article on the Dodgers & Orioles leaving bonus money to potentially sign Roki Sasaki early in the posting period was written by Buster Olney, and posted in the Padres ESPN page. No mention of the Padres in that article [!], so why did Olney put it in the Padres ESPN news feed?

Tue 14 Jan 2025 11:23 AM CST

Roki Sasaki has cooled the MLB Hot Stove for weeks now, until he can sign for maximum bonus money starting tomorrow. This is what top talent does, it freezes the market until a decision is made. Until then everyone has hope & anticipation, and ideas based on that, but nothing to act on. Reducing the field to three still doesn’t resolve much, even for the 27 teams on the outside, because they need partners to trade with and the Padres are MLB’s leading trade partner. The Dodgers make deals too, but notice they’ve already been active in the free agent market before the Sasaki sweepstakes started coming to a head. The Dodgers weren’t as sure on Sasaki as the Padres, so they signed Blake Snell early. Andrew Friedman is no dummy.

After Roki Sasaki signs, I see Xander Bogaerts to the Yankees who are looking for another middle infielder. Both GM’s know what they are doing and have made mutually beneficial trades in the past, namely the Juan Soto deal. AJP needs to move contract with Bogaerts and get something in return, which may involve throwing-in another good player– or pitcher. I don’t see AJP dealing any prospects at this point. C Luis Campusano needs a change of scenery and is another trade chip for AJP this winter. Perhaps the most valuable Padres trade chip is ace closer Robert Suarez who is due $10M in 2025 and team controllable through 2027. Yankees already snatched ace closer Devin Williams from the Brewers, leaving free agent Tanner Scott & trade candidate Robert Suarez as the top remaining closer options for contending teams to acquire this winter. RHP Dylan Cease is yet another AJP blockbuster trade candidate. Padres need to fill holes (or upgrade) at C, DH, 1B & LF if they want to beat the Dodgers in 2025, and that’s assuming they sign Roki Sasaki. AJP has a plan, and Sasaki (& the international draft) come first.

Tue 14 Jan 2025 12:40 PM CST

This will be my final installment of this piece. I’ve predicted & explained Roki Sasaki to the Padres, before it happens, because I’ve seen this before from AJP. At no time during this process did I believe AJP wouldn’t get Roki Sasaki. AJP is controlling the market until he gets what he wants. He does it consistently, and as a fan, it’s always exciting to witness– even when he gets screwed by MLB.

Not this time, I’ve predicted. Too many aware eyeballs on the process this time prevents Black Hand machinations in the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes. The illusion of the Sasaki sweepstakes is that it was an open process to all 30 teams. In reality, only a handful were allowed to be considered and East Coast Bias had a word on which teams would be best for MLB.

Can you imagine what MLB would do if Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the Reds or Pirates? [!!] That isn’t good for baseball according to those who own & run baseball, and on that they have a point, but when it comes to directly interfering with the amateur free agent process through East Coast Bias leverage with the MLB commissioner’s office, that needs to be called out as tampering. In 2018, the Red Sox & MLB tampered with the Padres in their pursuit of Shohei Ohtani. That lesson hasn’t been forgotten by AJP and his Padres organization, or their fans. May the best team win the Sasaki sweepstakes!

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NCAA, NIL, and US politics

Posted on January 11, 2025 by admin

College sports have exploded since the landmark Ed O’Bannon v NCAA decision in 2015, which now allows NCAA student athletes to earn NIL money for themselves. This came into reality by 2020, and since then it’s been the NCAA trying to self-regulate NIL payments to athletes, followed by student athletes challenging these new rules in court– and often winning.

A well-written recent ESPN article by Dan Murphy titled “Texas senator aims to help NCAA regulate athlete payments”, indicates that Capitol Hill lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are ready to give the NCAA what it wants.

What’s at stake is big money. According to this ESPN article, “the Big Ten and SEC each raked in more than $850 million in their most recent fiscal year, leaving even their power conference peers in the ACC ($706 million) and Big 12 ($511 million) significantly behind.”

The core issue is collective bargaining rights for NCAA student athletes. The NCAA (& US lawmakers) are against it, while most student athletes don’t understand its revolutionary implications. To have collective bargaining rights, means you must be an employee that earns for an employer. Athletes that play big-time NCAA sports do just that, yet the NCAA insists their student athletes aren’t employees.

When such an impasse is reached in bourgeois politics, this is when its lawmakers & courts get involved, by crafting legislation into laws that don’t violate basic rights as defined by the judiciary– in theory at least. This is always a biased process, colored by class & personal interests.

It is worth recalling the only American institution which is exempt from federal antitrust laws is Major League Baseball (MLB). In 1922, the US Supreme Court made one of its more reactionary rulings which still stands, in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League, ruling that baseball was a “purely state affair” and not interstate commerce. The court concluded that profiting from local “human effort and skill” in the sport did not constitute interstate commerce. The court found that transporting teams to play in other states was a “mere incident, not the essential thing”.

What was at issue was the ‘reserve clause’, which kept MLB players bound to their club for life. The owners of MLB were granted anti-trust exemption by a business-friendly government, which kept players salaries artificially suppressed. It wasn’t until MLBPA legal representative Marvin Miller (pic below) challenged this in court in the 1970’s that free agency came to MLB, and eventually all the major sports leagues.

These same issues are in play today with the NCAA’s leading universities acting as owners to keep NIL athletes from forming a union and having collective bargaining rights. The NCAA doesn’t consider it’s money-earning athletes to be employees, even though they can be (and are) paid by universities & alumni boosters to make money for them. These athletes clearly work for the NCAA, and if that isn’t the definition of an employee, then what is? The courts have taken this legal position on every NCAA attempt to control NIL-athletes ability to earn, etc, as the courts don’t buy the NCAA’s argument that NIL athletes aren’t employees.

At this point, Congress has been asked to step into the fray, in the form of Ted Cruz (R-TX). Texas is a HUGE football state, and the University of Texas just joined the SEC, making the final four of the 2024-25 CFP. It’s the huge money at stake, in terms of TV revenue for football that is driving all this. Football generates over three times the revenue for the NCAA that basketball does.

NCAA hoops is booming too, particularly on the women’s side, as they finally have regular network TV broadcasts, largely catalyzed by the popularity of Caitlin Clark at the University of Iowa, etc. It’s the Big 10 & SEC that have expanded into super-conferences, who are taking the lion’s share of this revenue, and demanding more in the future. There is a perception among those in-the-know that the NCAA may become a two-tiered system– with elite schools competing for national titles in all the major sports, but especially football– and then all the rest just existing on the fringes. Some would argue that has happened already.

Ted Cruz has been brought in (& bought by) the NCAA to make sure no collective bargaining rights are appropriated to NCAA athletes. And so Congress has been entrusted to work out a system which favors the NCAA in its further exploitation of student athletes. No unionization means not having to pay insurance, health care costs, even pensions, etc, to student-athletes who have earned for the NCAA. Attempts at denying these employee-athletes their right to bargain collectively, and thus be a united fist against the NCAA, violate anti-trust laws and will be open to strong legal challenges in the courts.

This is a revolutionary issue for young student athletes, as this goes down to high school now. The window for elite athletic competition is small and it’s a young man’s/woman’s game. Young athletes need to learn their history and speak to each other on these issues. Today, all sports are designed to bring prestige & money to a NCAA university. Sports has tremendous value. Volleyball, skiing, gymnastics, etc, are now broadcast regularly on the major networks as weekend sports programming. If they don’t have football, then just about any other sport will do.

Regular TV has gone to total garbage, with AI now taking over. Reality TV is now largely sports-competition based, in case you haven’t noticed. That makes sports programming more coveted than ever. The NCAA is attempting to cap it’s cost/university. Right now each university is allowed to spend $20.5M/year in NIL money to its athletes. Of course, for Texas, Alabama, Ohio State & Michigan, that isn’t enough, so alumni boosters kick in another $5-10M annually to give them the competitive edge they insist on having. For all intents & purposes, these university presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners are the NCAA.

So what we have is a closed loop between the bourgeois politics of Ted Cruz and the NCAA. What has been left out of this political discussion are the athletes voices. This NIL & transfer portal era in the NCAA has become a Wild West of unethical recruiting, broken promises on agreed-to deals, and endless transfers & lawsuits from aggrieved student athletes. What it has done to the product on the playing field is obvious. There are no more programs at these universities– football, hoops, baseball, etc. They are now rotating sports factories designed to make maximum financial profit every year. This applies to the NIL athletes too.

And what we have are a bunch of kids who don’t fully realize the bigger game they are part of. They want to compete at the highest level, and they also want to get paid & go pro. Their competitive nature inherently directs them away from turning to others for help in obtaining their rights as employees of the NCAA. That is the barrier these young men & women must overcome to help themselves. By uniting and joining with others, you become stronger and help yourself in turn.

Final thoughts: Football & men’s basketball are the only profitable NCAA sports. The House Settlement, (named after ASU swimmer Grant House) which allows NIL revenue-sharing with student-athletes (along with back pay for former athletes dating back to 2016), has received preliminary approval from a federal judge. As with every other capitalist institution & setup, there are vast inequalities in this NCAA-NIL system. Of the $20.5M annually currently allowed (set to increase in the future), 90% of it will go towards football ($~15M) & men’s hoops (~$3M). The vast majority of NCAA student athletes don’t have NIL deals, and have been completely unrepresented in the process.

What this will create is a two-tiered layer of athletics across the NCAA and on every campus. The vast majority will be regular student athletes, with an elite layer of NIL-athletes for whom this professionalized system was created. Yes, stars are important to winning and they grab the TV ratings, but in football & hoops you need a TEAM to win. When all the programs become stratified in the manner I’ve described, you don’t have teams anymore– just a bunch of guys with the same-colored jersey. Thus, the competition becomes less compelling on every level.

NIL money for student athletes has the potential to revolutionize athletics for the better, but as anyone can see, it is instead being used by the NCAA & its power conferences to increase their monopoly power over college sports, while enriching only an elite class of athletes. This mirrors how real-world capitalism deals with any social inequality issue– it promotes a thin layer of union bureaucrats, blacks, women, gays, etc, to create the illusion of fairness & equality for all. The logic of identity politics is: Because OJ Simpson became rich & famous, all blacks should be happy– and so on.

Unless student athletes unite and appoint their own legal & media representatives in this fight, then most of them will be excluded from any benefits or compensation. Deion Sanders, head football coach at the University of Colorado has the clout to get his players (including his own son) top NIL deals. LeBron James can get his son a lucrative NIL deal at USC for a year, until he goes pro. These are the people being enriched by NIL money, and it’s an advantage most student athletes don’t have.

Also note that these NIL expenditures didn’t get the Trojans into the NCAA Tournament, or the Buffaloes into the CFP. It turns out you need a group players who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good (along with top talent) to win. NIL deals distort that paradigm. How can a coach create a consistent winning culture & team camaraderie when top players transfer every year? At this point, sports are all about entertainment, with winning & excellence being secondary– especially in the NCAA.

The professionalization of college & high school sports is a modern reality. The idea of sports is that it is fair to all and merit-based, meaning those who are the most-talented & work the hardest will excel above the rest. The reality is that if you don’t have money-backed competitive advantages working for you, you will get crushed by those who do.

Sports academies offer specialized professional training and top competition for aspiring young talent, but they are expensive and out-of-reach for most working class families. College sports is becoming more bourgeois at its roots, because you need these such advantages to compete for NIL deals at top NCAA universities.

On football:

When the NCAA kingpins who rule the Big 10 (now 18 schools) decided it would be a good idea to bring UCLA, USC, etc, into their conference because it benefits Michigan & Ohio State football, that doesn’t work out so well for the other sports whose west-coast athletes now have to fly to Rutgers & Maryland for conference competition. This is one example of the nefarious & destructive influence of football in college athletics.

In many ways football needs to be it’s own entity– apart from universities & education– because it is so powerful it can swallow up any school. It can absorb any evil such as organized crime & gambling in the NFL. The Universities of Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Texas, USC, Alabama, etc, are beholden to football. The power it has over alumni is incalculable.

Football often defines that institution, and in this era of branding & NIL rights, that is more powerful than ever. Football is the PR department for the University of Miami Hurricanes and has been since Howard Schnellenberger. The same goes for FSU under Bobby Bowden, and the Florida Gators under Steve Spurrier & Urban Meyer. UCF in Orlando has become a top-25 football program out of nowhere due to massive financial inputs from the university, alumni & boosters.

The problem of the NCAA & NIL rights can’t be divorced from football. It is an addicting game, but it has a tremendous cost which is largely overlooked. Football ruins the lives of people who don’t even play, but instead bet compulsively on it. Lots of them are former high school/college players who never made it any further, yet somehow believe they have some special insight into the game. They don’t. It’s a physical, punishing game that grinds its participants into retirement. CTE, Parkinson’s, etc, are just a few of the long-term brain afflictions that await football greats when they retire.

These realities need to be widely discussed and accounted for when collective bargaining issues such at NCAA NIL rights are at stake. It’s the athletes who are competing in field hockey, soccer, wrestling, etc, that are being excluded from these discussions. It’s the university athletic directors, presidents & power conference commissioners (based on football), that are running the NCAA in their own interests. The NCAA student athletes need to come together under the banner of collective bargaining to have any voice in their future.

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Blowback ISIS terrorism & US imperialism

Posted on January 2, 2025 by admin

A U.S. Army veteran from Texas, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who was employed by Deloitte is the suspect in the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans that killed at least 15 people and injured 30 more. Shamsud-Din Jabbar had an ISIS flag flying on the back of the truck he used to ram through crowded Bourbon Street as people were celebrating the New Year around 3:15 AM local time. Jabbar was subsequently killed in a shootout with police.

The driver of a Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel hours later on New Year’s Day has been identified as Matthew Livelsberger, according to media reports. Both suspects are believed to have rented their vehicles from the carsharing company Turo, which brings up obvious questions as to these acts being connected. According to media reports, Matthew Livelsberger & Shamsud-Din Jabbar allegedly served at the same military base.

Significantly– the FBI, the police, and especially president Joe Biden, have nothing to say to the American people on this– all while discouraging the public from coming to their own conclusions. The corporate news media is focusing on the lack of dump trucks as barricades in New Orleans, which possibly could have prevented a vehicle from ramming through the crowd. Meanwhile, virtually zero questions are being critically pursued into the origins of this ISIS terrorism.

In other words, terrorism that is likely the byproduct of US imperialism, is to be used as a future pretext for martial law against the American population. The FBI’s job is to be a black hole, by sucking in all facts & information regarding the events, while revealing nothing (or as little as possible) to the public. The FBI has been expert at this since the JFK assassination.

ISIS relies on US intelligence to covertly supply them with its weaponry, including armor, guns, surface-to-air missiles, and even some aircraft. For example, US-made TOW anti-tank missiles have been supplied by the United States and Saudi Arabia to the Free Syrian Army (ISIS) which finally toppled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month.

The well known connections of US intelligence to ISIS/Al Qaeda goes back to the Afghan mujahideen (always referred to as ‘rebels’ in the bourgeois media), who in 1979, who were organized, funded & armed to fight against the Soviet Union’s military invasion of that country. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Advisor of the US under Jimmy Carter, wanted to give the USSR their own Vietnam War, bogging the Russians down in an unwinnable conflict in order to bleed the decaying Soviet regime white. This was US Cold War policy, and it’s the current objective in Ukraine.

After the USSR was forced to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 1989, this mujahideen was reorganized into Al-Qaeda under the local leadership of Osama bin Laden, a high-level US intelligence asset. Bin Laden was an asset to US intelligence up until the 9/11 attacks, which still haven’t been seriously explained to the American people.

The ensuing US “war on terror” made Osama bin-Laden a wanted man globally, but he still remained under the protective umbrella of US intelligence, hiding in Pakistan (a strong regional ally of the US) for years until his assassination by a US special forces death squad in 2011.

At this point politically, US president Barack Obama had made the foreign policy shift from “war on terror” to his “pivot to China”. Syria was seen as “low hanging fruit” to be plundered by US imperialism with the aid of Islamic terrorist militias, and this was when Al Qaeda became known as ISIS. Their militias, with overt & covert US support, seized key Syrian oil fields and destroyed the Syrian economy, while terrorizing the general population, all in the name of regime change under the banner of “humanitarian intervention”. These ISIS/Al Qaeda/HTS terrorists are often paid in crypto-currency by US intelligence agencies, which is cheap & untraceable.

A review of this history & these facts provides the necessary context for understanding the terrorist actions in New Orleans & Las Vegas on New Year’s Day 2025. Any “investigation” that avoids this is an official whitewash of ‘blowback’ terrorism. The US government spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military, and yet ISIS/Al Qaeda is stronger than ever, and that is no coincidence.

The vast majority of these domestic terrorist acts are committed by people with US military training, which is no coincidence either. When politicians (& Elon Musk) claim, “all options are on the table” for budget cutting, they never mention the military as a possibility, which also is no coincidence. Terrorism & police state spending dovetail with the interests of the ruling class, which wants the population to be subdued into accepting US state propaganda as fact (at gunpoint if necessary) in order to maintain the existing levels of social inequality.

Wrap-up: If you’re a regular reader here then you’re familiar with my discussions the Black Hand and its murky nature. US intelligence & Wall Street finance are the murky forces behind terrorism. They control the mass media who are willing sheep. The NBC Evening News on January 1, 2025 was another example of this. Last night’s broadcast was an extended special edition devoted to propagandizing these terror attacks, as Jimmy Carter’s death (endlessly reported up until then) was dropped.

After 30 minutes of Lester Holt insisting the FBI wasn’t in charge of these investigations, several NBC on-site reporters revealed the opposite, finally forcing Lester Holt to mumble an admission that the FBI was indeed in charge. Anyone with an ounce of political brains already knew this, and that’s when discerning viewers turn off the TV and get onto the internet & social media.

Major news outlets from NBC & Fox to the New York Times & the Wall Street Journal normally have their stories spoonfed to them through political & corporate information gatekeepers. White House & Congressional “contacts, sources”, and so forth… The White House typically tells the press what today’s story is and that’s how the news is made. Any investigative reporting outside those parameters is frowned upon & usually censored.

But when an unexpected event happens, such as these apparently-related New Year’s terror attacks, the mass media is always behind on the story because they are so used to having the entire narrative handed to them. When they have to investigate and provide analysis of a live event, right now, even though they have vast resources to pull from, they are inevitably far behind any serious local reporting & social media updates.

The corporate ideology of capitalism as an unquestionable force of good, blinds any serious analysis from its institutions. Social media is how most people find out what’s going on and share it today. It’s also how these-type events are seriously investigated, as “official” agencies will be hushed & coerced into silence by the Black Hand which feeds them. Just like everything else from JFK to 9/11, it’s murky murky.

The blood-soaked Saudi monarchy, the second-most important ally of US imperialism in the Middle East, provides the rank-and-file raw material for Al Qaeda, ISIS, or whatever you want to call it. These reactionary Islamic fanatics know they must bow to Israel, US imperialism’s most important ally in the Middle East. All these governments & intelligence agencies coordinate these conflicts in their interests, which don’t always coincide to say the least.

And that’s the danger of state-sponsored terrorism which isn’t acknowledged to the public due to “national security”, it can strike anywhere at any time, and ultimately it can lead to an extinction event for humanity. The mass media doesn’t care, so it’s up to the people on social media who do care to inform & lead themselves.

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Jimmy Carter and his 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott

Posted on December 30, 2024 by admin

The 1980 boycott of the summer Olympics in Moscow was contemptible hypocritical politics from Jimmy Carter. President Carter made this unilateral announcement in January 1980, just weeks before the 1980 winter Olympics were to be begin in Lake Placid, NY; where Soviet Union athletes were invited to compete, despite the 1979 USSR invasion of Afghanistan, which was US president Jimmy Carter’s pretense for the Moscow summer games boycott.

In Lake Placid, the 1980 US hockey team defeated the mighty USSR machine and miraculously won the gold medal. The best sports documentary on these events is the ESPN 30-for-30: Of Miracles and Men (2015).

The Lake Placid Games were held from February 13 to 24, 1980, with the Miracle on Ice game (US 4, USSR 3) played on February 22. Note: this was a tape-delayed ABC broadcast, meaning most viewers already knew the US had won, but everyone still watched. Also note that US athletes were competing against Soviet Union athletes, while Jimmy Carter’s “Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan” ultimatum on a summer games boycott was lingering over the entire competition.

At that point you couldn’t find an American who would have supported a Soviet Union boycott of these winter Olympics, as it would have largely invalidated the US hockey gold. And that’s the point of the Olympics, if you don’t like someone, then beat them (fairly!) in the athletic arena and you can cheer. That’s better than killing people. Olympic competition is international by nature, and any boycott for political reasons does violence to that egalitarian principle.

I’ve spoken with a former track athlete who was affected by the boycott. His response was to compete under another flag, which he did, saying it was probably his only chance at Olympic glory. Years later, he had no regrets about what he did. Reading comments from others on Reddit, I discovered much of that same sentiment from others. Here are a few samples of popular comments in italics:

I hate it. Don’t involve athletes in geo political BS.

Trash move. Athletes work their whole lives for that shot.

One of my gym teachers in high school was an older gentleman who had qualified for these Olympics (weightlifting). You could tell when he talked about it that there was still lingering disappointment and regret, decades later. And understandably so.

I understand the reasoning, but in reality it did nothing but harm innocent athletes. No international policy changed as a result, just a bunch of people who worked their whole lives just to not be given their shot.

Worked with a guy who was on the men’s field hockey team. Never got another chance. Edit: I should add that because he was officially on the Olympic team, he was given lifetime access to any Olympic training facility. He said “whoop-dee-fucking-doo”.

I hated it. Athletes have a limited window.

My father, a life-long Democrat, but also a longtime track & field and Olympics fan, never forgave Carter for this. There were certainly other ways we could have protested the Soviet Union’s actions without destroying the dreams and athletic careers of people who had done nothing at all to deserve to be treated that way.

Jimmy carter being disconnected to the feelings of the American people! Color me shocked. Athletes that have one chance of competing in the Olympics being pawns in international politics is awful no matter who’s doing it.

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Jimmy Carter completely disregarded all this, and unilaterally insisted US athletes would not compete in the 1980 summer Olympics. It was never held to any popular support litmus test in the media; it was presented as an ultimatum from an unchallengeable authority figure.

Today, Jimmy Carter’s decision wouldn’t hold up in court, but back in that day, Olympic athletes didn’t have agents. Today, top athletes are professionalized by high school. Back then, the Olympics were billed as the most prestigious international competition of amateur athletes. Eastern Bloc athletic training & doping programs made a mockery of that Olympic principle, and when the NBA ‘Dream Team’ conquered Barcelona in 1992, the Olympics officially became professionalized.

ESPN currently has Jimmy Carter’s death in their news feed, and their portrayal of his 1980 Moscow Olympic boycott is one of him being a courageous leader. ESPN is completely clueless on international politics and out-of-touch with how American working people & sports fans feel about Jimmy Carter. The Democrats needed Jimmy Carter’s death to serve as (yet another) a temporary distraction from their party’s collapse in November, their ensuing surrender to Donald Trump, and all the other political realities they are trying so hard to avoid.

Wrap-up: It is always questionable in bourgeois politics whether it’s worse to be a weak president (Carter), or a disgraced president (Nixon). In short, Jimmy Carter was a weak president capable of only the most limited reforms, who was crushed by reactionary forces & ruling class interests in November 1980. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 as a liberal humanitarian, just as liberalism was dying out as a political force. “Stagflation” came into the political lexicon under his presidential watch, while his environmentalism, commitment to public education, defense of workers rights to decent jobs & wages, etc, were crushed by the forces of Reaganomics in the 1980’s.

Other notable Jimmy Carter presidential events include the Mariel boat-lift disaster in Miami, FL (April 15 to October 31, 1980), paving the way for reactionary anti-immigration reforms under Bush/Reagan. Cocaine Cowboys (2006) is a good documentary film with some insightful discussion on that.

Finally, no discussion of Jimmy Carter is complete without mentioning the hostage crisis with Iran. After the overthrow of the hated (US-backed) Shah through an Islamic-led revolution, 53 US diplomats & citizens were held hostage in Iran from November 4, 1979 until their release on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

A bungled military helicopter rescue attempt on April 24, 1980, in which there were multiple US fatalities, further sunk Carter’s popularity. In September 1980, the Iran–Iraq War broke out, further overwhelming Jimmy Carter in any attempt to find a diplomatic solution with Iran under his administration.

In the 1980 election, where an Independent candidate (John Anderson) was allowed to debate and be on the ballot, the incumbent Jimmy Carter lost to Republican challenger Ronald Reagan: 489-49 in the Electoral College. The Democrats didn’t recover politically until Bill Clinton in 1992.

Perhaps Jimmy Carter’s most celebrated diplomatic achievement will be the last to be discussed here, his Camp David Accords, signed in March 1979 by the US, Israel & Egypt– explicitly excluding Palestinians. It was packaged by Jimmy Carter to the world as “a framework for peace in the Middle East”. Like other “humanitarian interventions” under Jimmy Carter, these feeble & myopic attempts at shuttle diplomacy were all quickly undone by monopoly capitalism & imperialism, and that is the legacy of Jimmy Carter.

The death of Jimmy Carter is an ironic reflection of the current political situation. President Joe Biden has ordered maximum effusive praise for the former Georgia peanut farmer who became US president. “He was a better ex-president than president,” is liberalism’s apologetic way of admitting Jimmy Cater was a failure, while conveniently & systematically overlooking those failures.

The collapse of Biden/Harris/Waltz in 2024 mirrors the political situation after Carter/Mondale got wiped out in 1980. Reactionary & predatory forces were/are working behind-the-scenes and licking their chops after the Democratic Party set the groundwork for the social, political & economic disaster to come. By Joe Biden’s order, through January 9, 2025, US flags are to fly half-staff in observance of this husk of liberalism that most Americans (rich & poor) despised.

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Pussy Riot reeks of provocation

Posted on December 29, 2024 by admin

There’s a lot of fake political art out there: sophisticated propaganda that broadcasts liberal values to a liberal audience. Pussy Riot’s performance of A Punk Prayer (2012) occupies that pole: focusing on feminist-LGBT rights, while maintaining an explicitly anti-Putin line that dovetails with an undying support for the fascists in Kiev. It’s strictly identity politics & anti-Putin propaganda for these CIA cut-outs known as Pussy Riot.

Staged in brightly-colored balaclavas to conceal their identity, while punching & kicking the air in ‘punk defiance’, these feminist, pro-war phonies have existed under the protective wing of western imperialism for over a decade. A Punk Prayer is nothing more than a provocative publicity stunt by a bunch of imperialist-backed puppets. After such a time, what is the balance sheet on their popular influence?

First, no one knows any songs by Pussy Riot. No kids have Pussy Riot content on any of their playlists, or seriously recommends their music. No members of Pussy Riot play any musical instruments or have any songwriting chops. No one can even name all the band members, or how they met, etc. Everything about Pussy Riot is shrouded in mystery. All their songs lyrics & political statements come straight from Langley, VA & the US State Department. Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon about Pussy Riot is they are so well known in the media, without having any real fans– or content.

Pussy Riot’s western support is entirely from a wealthy political class & the fake corporate media. Since being mercilessly exposed as nothing more than anti-Russian propaganda by myself in the late 2010’s, Pussy Riot were branded “foreign agents” by the Russian government at the end of 2021, confirming my political & artistic analysis. As a musical artist, these imposters never fooled me, as I smelled a rat with Pussy Riot from the start.

At this point in history, Pussy Riot now labels itself an “activist art collective”, because they are obviously not a band or even musicians. Their “concerts” are a joke— instead of performing music, they talk about their feminism/lesbianism at length, then chant anti-Putin vulgarities while dumping water on the crowd. In 2020, Pussy Riot was online promoting a fake tour that didn’t exist, due to venue lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Promoting Pussy Riot as ‘punk’ is no longer tenable, as all they do now is issue NFT crypto and promote US State Department propaganda through their website Mediazona. Here’s a cozy photo of Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, with Antony Blinken in 2022.

Mediazona is a US-supported media propaganda outlet focused on anti-Putin opposition, founded by Nadya Tolokonnikova & her Pussy Riot cohorts in 2014. This has become Pussy Riot’s primary vehicle for “activism”, since their musical “popularity” has waned due to inconvenient facts coming to light. Once again, can you sing (or even hum) a single Pussy Riot song? Do you know ANYONE who can?

Pussy Riot has become a world famous “act” with no recognizable content. That’s quite remarkable, and reveals much about the state of art in today’s world. The art market has become completely corrupted by big money to the point where there is no art– only dressed-up propaganda narratives packaged as ‘art’.

In 2012, Nadya Tolokonnikova was listed as Time Magazine’s ‘100 Women of the Year’, while also receiving the LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2019, Tolokonnikova received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from Rhode Island School of Design – for being a “powerful voice in the fight against tyranny,” while The Guardian ranked her #4 in Best Art of the 21st Century, for her Punk Prayer video. In 2023, Nadya Tolokonnikova was awarded the Woodie Guthrie Prize, rendering that honor meaningless while muddying the name of that great original folk singer. And so it goes, as Hillary Clinton is a big fan of Pussy Riot.

Kathleen Hanna was The Punk Singer (2013), the unmistakable voice of Bikini Kill, the last great rock band (in this artist’s opinion). What happened to Bikini Kill is what happened to the entertainment industry overall. Kathleen Hanna embraced Pussy Riot around the time her (long overdue) documentary was released on Netflix, so clearly her support for Pussy Riot helped with the movie distribution. For what it’s worth, The Punk Singer is a good documentary film and that’s what happened to Bikini Kill & rock music.

No, Pussy Riot isn’t here to save humanity from catastrophe though their fearless activism. They are instead stooges of imperialism. Pussy Riot receives complete support from the corporate media and every other capitalist institution. A February 2021 Greyzone investigative article titled ‘Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,” leaked docs reveal’, confirmed this. Pussy Riot’s role in this NATO propaganda campaign is discussed in it:

New leaked documents show Reuters’ and the BBC’s involvement in covert UK FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] programs to effect “attitudinal change” and “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” alongside intel contractors and Bellingcat… As a UK FCO contractor, the Zinc Network said it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” not only to Meduza, but also to Mediazona, a supposedly independent media venture founded by two members of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot. One of Mediazona’s founders, Nadya Tolokonnikova, shared a stage with former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 conference. The following year, Tolokonnikova trashed now-imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming, “He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.”

For the record, Julian Assange is a heroic journalist, beloved by hundreds-of-millions worldwide, who was unjustly persecuted by the imperialist governments of the US/UK for years over phony sexual assault claims, for the crime of telling people the truth about government-approved war crimes, etc. Pussy Riot attacks Julian Assange (and anyone else who speaks for the oppressed masses) for inspiring revolutionary thinking & action. As reactionary puppets of imperialism, Pussy Riot reeks of provocation.

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Extended Play Singles (2024)

Posted on December 28, 2024 by admin

This Extended Play project began in Sanford, FL before the COVID-19 pandemic, as a collection of ‘swan song’ singles. With the release of “The Electric Cat” this project is complete and has been re-named Extended Play Singles. Cover photo, artwork & production by Tom Pearce. It is now available on your favorite streaming platform.

I’m also pleased to announce that Magnified (2012) has been re-released onto the major streaming platforms. It’s very complicated how these songs are put up and then later disappear, but that’s a reality of the modern mp3 streaming market. Platforms for upload & distribution change their policies, get bought out, go out of business, etc. Independent artists are constantly being taken down, moved back, marginalized & de-platformed to make more room for Beyonce & Taylor Swift.

The current artistic situation is untenable, and talented artists in every sphere: music, film, arts & literature are being squeezed out in favor of mediocre corporate phonies. This is why popular music, film & culture are at such a low level. There is no money for real artists. The idea of Trump and his billionaire class cronies, including all the Democrats, is to silence & destroy all the artists. Everything from Trump’s anti-immigrant racism, to the #MeToo campaign’s false feminist hysteria is meant to divide oppressed workers with ignorance & false political narratives.

No serious artists are allowed to perform anymore, and the list of blacklisted talent is staggering. It began with Kevin Spacey being witch-hunted with false sexual assault allegations in November 2017, as the #MeToo campaign instantly became known to the world. Every bourgeois media news outlet was part of this reactionary feminist campaign to attack prominent artists such as Kevin Spacey, and effectively remove them from the entertainment industry. Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, and countless others have been ‘cancelled’ by the #MeToo campaign, which is an identity politics prong of the CIA Democrats overall offensive on the working class.

Until there is revolutionary change in global society– meaning our economics & politics– there can be no substantial art & culture allowed into the mainstream. Only more football. All significant art taking place today is happening ‘underground’, meaning outside the corporate sphere. Thus, underground art is cut off from a mainstream breakthrough by every tentacle of monopoly capitalism & imperialism.

Those performers advocating for political reforms, while defending the Democratic Party, are lazy liberals. As proof: What impact did they have on Election 2024? The fascist Donald Trump steamrolled the imperialist flunky Kamala Harris, and now the Democrats & corporate media are looking forward to working with Trump in attacking the working class. On that, they are always united.

For real artists, the art is about the art. It’s not a vehicle to make money or a pathway to “stardom”. It’s about what you put into it and how it affects people– including yourself. It was fun to make this music, and certainly worthwhile, but when you’re all out of songs and no one in control will let you have the stage, then you move on to something else. That’s what I’ve done.

The music still lives, and that’s the point. As long as people care about music, film & art, it will live on. I had ideas I needed to express to the world in musical form and I hope it will inspire listeners & fans to do the same in their own creative way. That’s all an artist can do.

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CIA-backed Al-Qaeda terrorist militia overthrows Syrian government

Posted on December 8, 2024 by admin

An open conflict with Syria broke out in March 2011, with the US-imperialist objective being the overthrow of president Bashar Assad for his “crime” of having a favorable relationship with Russia. That goal has now been achieved with widespread reports that President Bashar Assad has fled Damascus and left the country.

A CIA-backed shock offensive that began on November 27, quickly swept through Syria as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist militias took the northern city of Aleppo, then the central city of Hama, and finally surrounded Damascus forcing Assad to flee for his life. The Syrian Army melted away, and offered little resistance to the CIA-backed terrorists.

Police headquarters in Damascus was apparently abandoned, with no officers. The Damascus airport has been evacuated and all flights cancelled. Popular support for Assad had eroded to the point where no one would defend him anymore, and with no organized working class resistance, this allowed imperialist-funded Islamic terrorists to take over the Syrian government in a 10-day military offensive.

Note that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham are referred to as the “rebel opposition” in western propaganda. HTS controlled much of northwest Syria throughout the conflict, and in 2017 set up the Syrian Salvation Government in political opposition to Assad. HTS used this CIA-backed political cutout to run day-to-day affairs in the region which included stealing Syria’s oil and terrorizing its population.

According to propaganda reports, “HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani has sought in recent years to remake the group’s image, cutting ties with al-Qaida, ditching hard-line officials and vowing to embrace pluralism and religious tolerance.”

US imperialism accepts this hogwash entirely as truth, as U.S. president-elect Donald Trump on Saturday posted on social media that the United States should avoid engaging militarily in Syria. Separately, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Biden administration had no intention of intervening there, presumably since the CIA had already done the job.

Qatar’s top diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, a top ally of US imperialism in the Middle East, criticized Assad for failing to take advantage of the lull in fighting in recent years to address the country’s underlying problems, stating “Assad didn’t seize this opportunity to start engaging and restoring his relationship with his people.”

Bashar Assad threw in his lot with Vladimir Putin long ago, and now he is a president in exile. All this conflict in Syria is just another expanding front of the initial stages of WWIII. Joe Biden’s provocation & escalation of his NATO-led proxy war using Ukraine to fight Russia weakened external support for Assad in Syria. Imperialist backing of IDF genocide in Gaza, along with Israeli military aggression against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and also Iran, has put the Middle East on a knife’s edge.

Trump is only preparing for an escalation of all this, particularly by bringing China into the global conflict. The trade tariffs Trump is threatening are direct attacks on foreign national economies, and with be met with sharp responses. China has already banned the export of critical rare earth & hard metals, vital for computer chips & AI technology.

The truth is, there are no “Made in America” products anymore. Everything you buy & consume is produced by a globalized economy. Inputs & resources come from all over the world, and products are manufactured & assembled, then shipped across the seas to markets all over the world. Inflation will only get worse under a trade tariff regime and violent conflicts will only increase. The threat of nuclear Armageddon is very real, yet it is being minimized & ignored in all political discussions.

No bourgeois political in the world has a plan for peace, much less prosperity for the working masses. All they have are bankrupt ideologies & empty slogans, backed by a corporate-military-intelligence complex that rules the world as an untouchable class of elites. This billionaire class supports fascism, which is why Trump won on November 5.

The only political force that can stop fascism is an internationally united working class armed with a revolutionary socialist program. Political censorship is here to stay and it’s only getting worse. If the American working class doesn’t organize a resistance to domestic fascism, then we will eventually suffer the same fate as the people of Syria.

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Election 2024: final notes

Posted on November 6, 2024 by admin

Pre-election articles are here & here. Election night coverage is here.

Third party candidates as a composite (and where they were allowed on the ballot) had a hard time cracking the 2% threshold in any state. A total media blackout, combined with social media censorship, legal attacks, etc, dooms third-party candidacies to irrelevance, as both major parties claim they have the only “winnable” and “serious” candidates. It’s only when those terms are so distorted by cynical politics that this can be true, as it was in 2024.

The right-wing attack ads were endless and for much of that we have Elon Musk to thank. This crypto-currency billionaire fascist has just been elevated to political power without receiving a single vote. What we have is political opportunism & backroom deals, with nothing for working class voters– red or blue.

No left voice was allowed to be raised & taken seriously in the corporate media during the entire two-year presidential campaign. Jill Stein & the Green party, etc, orbit the Democrats. The Greens message in 2024 was “Vote Kamala, but if you can’t, then vote for Jill Stein instead of Trump.” Does this sound like a serious strategy? How can a political alternative be built with this approach? In short, it isn’t and it can’t.

Meanwhile, RFK, Jr endorsed Trump and (like Elon Musk) is in line for a cabinet position after being kicked out of the Democratic primaries. The Democrats went with a ‘Biden or bust’ strategy, until they couldn’t maintain that fiction anymore. Top CIA Democrats including Barrack Obama forced Joe Biden to step aside for Kamala Harris after his disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump on June 27. By then the primaries were over, with the delegates assigned to Biden, so a replacement candidate had to be installed. The Democratic party primary in 2024 was a rigged farce by any political definition. People noticed, and it surely influenced their voting in the general.

Recall that in 2020, Kamala Harris was schooled & badly defeated by Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) in an early primary debate. Despite being an early favorite (rising star, etc), Kamala Harris quickly faded into irrelevance– until Joe Biden put her on his ticket as VP. Nothing she did earned her that title, she simply checked the right boxes while being a toe-the-party-line yes-woman. No one thought anything of her as a VP, until Joe Biden was being pressured by party leaders & big donors to drop out of the race.

For a former state prosecutor, Kamala Harris is remarkably wooden & dull. She clearly wouldn’t have survived an open & fair primary in 2024. Instead, Kamala Harris was enabled every step of the way, the same way the Democratic party handled candidate Joe Biden until late June. The same way the DNC rigged the machinery & rescued Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, both times from fake leftist Bernie Sanders (D-VT).

I earlier likened this entire campaign to episodes of House of Cards (2013-18). In Election 2024, Kamala Harris played the role of Jim Matthews/Jackie Sharp, meaning she was used & manipulated by higher powers to achieve their interests, in this case, handing the 2024 election to Trump. Opportunism, addiction to fame, flattery & celebrity, along with hubris allowed Kamala Harris to be manipulated by CIA Democrats– who prefer Trump to anything on the left. Kamala Harris & Joe Biden are now both lame duck losers. Joe Biden finally lost his grip on power because he’s an incoherent zombie. Kamala Harris never really attained any power because she’s a pretender. She’s not ruthless or smart enough in the eyes of the ruling class. That’s how she got played.

Kamala Harris started with all the momentum she needed to win, but ran a conservative run-out-the-clock campaign– befuddling insiders by avoiding press conferences, interviews, etc, for weeks on end. This was when most Americans barely knew who she was. It was a major red flag for someone running for US president, and a turning point for the Trump campaign. To Donald Trump’s credit, he apparently listened (by his standards) to his advisors more in 2024 than in 2020. Trump was able to posture himself as a folksy populist while Kamala was in hiding.

Whoever ran the Harris campaign wasn’t giving her the advice she needed to win. That’s perhaps a House of Cards episode in itself. Kamala Harris needed to tack left, anti-war with voters to beat Trump, but the CIA Democrats wouldn’t allow that. Thus Kamala Harris became politically indistinguishable from Joe Biden. When asked in an interview near the end of the campaign, Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t have done anything different as VP. That made her an easy target for Trump’s attack-ad campaign, bottomlessly funded by right-wing billionaires.

The Democrats relied on identity politics to mask Kamala Harris’ class politics. It didn’t fool voters in key battle ground districts. Being a black woman doesn’t mean anything in the arena of class & power politics. MeToo feminism, Black Lives Matter & LBGTQ+ campaigns are CIA Democratic attack dogs they unleash on the left & working class. It is a program of imperialist entitlement to create a thin later of representative stooges. Most voters despise these well-funded liberal snowflakes.

As I mix among the people the day after Election 2024, I see & hear very little jubilation. People are relieved this debased election is over, but they aren’t optimistic about the future. Most of those who voted for Trump realize he’s a sociopath & ignoramus, but they hate the Democrats even more and blame them for their misery. They have good reason for that, but the fact is nothing can be done about Trump & the CIA Democrats until workers & youth break from both parties of capitalism and take up the fight for socialism.

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) is the organ of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), which is the Trotskyist party of revolutionary internationalism. Any nationalist reformist programs & union bureaucracies are tools of the capitalist fake left, and must be smashed by worker-led organizations with a revolutionary program, as they all paved the way for Trump.

Speak openly with your friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc, about the important issues which were never discussed during Election 2024. Issues such as the imperialist drive to WW3, capitalist induced climate change, the forever COVID pandemic, attacks on democratic rights along with ever greater social inequality can no longer be ignored & suppressed. The only way these issues will move front & center in public debate is if workers & youth organize and act in revolutionary solidarity against the capitalist ruling class. I encourage all my fans & readers to read the WSWS and join the SEP.

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Democratic party collapses in Election 2024

Posted on November 6, 2024 by admin

Donald Trump won all seven battleground states: PA, WI, MI, GA, NC, NV & AZ to secure the Electoral College and become the next US president. This result was predictable and discussed here.

According to all the pollsters, Kamala Harris “underperformed” in the urban centers, on college campuses & with minorities. ‘Hillary 2.0’ is an apt description, as Kamala Harris failed to connect with working class & younger voters. Kamala Harris was a candidate of Wall Street & the military, and took a right-wing stance on immigration which didn’t endear her to key voting demographics.

Starting with how she was selected, to the billionaire support she courted, Kamala Harris didn’t fool enough voters in traditional demographics, most of whom ranked the economy & the direction of the country as their top issues. As far as protecting democratic rights goes, it was a major issue for voters, and attacking students & activists protesting IDF genocide in Gaza of the Palestinian population turned-off a lot of potential Democratic party voters– especially those in college & Muslim-Americans.

Trump didn’t win Election 2024 because he is popular. He won because it’s obvious that the imperialist Democratic party no longer offers any opposition to Republican fascism. The Democrats under Biden-Harris have started a war with Russia in the Ukraine, and a war in the Middle East with Israel as attack dog for US imperialism against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria & Iran– all with full Democratic party support.

The Trump party also won the Senate, defeating Democratic incumbents & overwhelming challengers in WI, MI, PA, NV & MT to take a 56-44 majority in the upper house, after pundits predicted only a 51-49 Republican edge. The House of Representatives is murkier as of this writing, but the Democrats are expected to regain control. [late edit 11-8-24: Senate is expected 54-46. Republicans will maintain their House majority, completely wiping out the Democrats in all three branches of federal government.]

This is nothing less than a collapse of grassroots support for the Democratic party. The party with money from big donor contributors, more favorable corporate media coverage (with star power endorsements), and arguably better political machinery infrastructure in key battleground states– lost. The Supreme Court has been packed with Trump appointees, meaning all three branches of the American government, executive, upper legislative & judicial will be controlled by MAGA fascists.

Workers & youth of the US and around the world must organize themselves under the banner of class struggle– independently of the Democratic party, the union apparatuses, and the fake left organizations such as the DSA and their associated NGO’s & other non-profits. This pseudo-left milieu is the reason Trump won in 2024.

The Supreme Court ruled this past summer that the president is above the law, while Trump has stated to his supporters that they don’t need to worry about elections & voting anymore. Those who rightfully fear the consequences of a second Trump presidency must rally around a political program of social equality & anti-war opposition to both major parties.

The Democrats have been floating olive branches to Trump for weeks now, shamefully acquiescing to fascism when it became clear that the Harris-Walz campaign was flailing. The only way to defeat fascism is by mass collective action from the only source of economic value, the international working class.

Wed 06 Nov 2024 03:15 AM CST

Post script: The role of the fake media in Election 2024 can be illustrated in a few NBC examples I observed. On Monday, election eve, NBC Nightly News reported “an earthquake” poll result in Iowa which claimed a 3-4 point edge for Kamala Harris in a red state that all the other polls had Trump easily winning. I turned off the news when I saw that and flipped to House of Cards on DVD.

Fox News coverage was amateur compared to NBC on Election Night. At 9:15 PM CST, I first saw the glum faces of NBC talking heads and knew the election was for Trump. Instead of admitting it & explaining this reality outright, NBC pundits maintained the fiction that Kamala Harris still had a chance. Blue wall and all that shit…

Fox (with lesser brains & technology) called Pennsylvania for Trump well before NBC. Donald Trump is being driven to a celebratory party of his supporters, ready to make a victory speech, and NBC still hasn’t called Pennsylvania, despite 90+% of the vote counted and Trump with an insurmountable lead. This was done partly to maintain false hope in the Democrats and partly to keep up the ratings– not necessarily in that order.

NBC will be hand-wringing its viewers for awhile, while they make their peace with Trump. As Joe Biden & Nancy Pelosi said after 1/6, “We need a strong Republican party.” In 2024, the Democrats got their wish.

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